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Apple Reportedly Storing Over 8 Million Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
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That’s unlikely. Serving non-China data from China would seriously slow down data transfers thanks to The Great Firewall.
I’ve experienced it myself. Voice calls from Singapore into China has about five second delays rountrip. Whereas there is no noticeable delay to call into Europe from the same location – even with video.
… and no, Singapore isn’t part of China. Not yet, as of this writing.
And yet Google pays Apple up to $12 billion a year to appear as the default search engine on iPhones and other Apple devices, according to a lawsuit last year. What a relationship! 🤦♂️
Of course you’re right. My calculations had 8 Exabytes as 8*10^18 instead of 8*2^60.
But I think the important part is that the $300 million is for the whole year and not every month. So make that $25 million a month which means 343.6 GB/$ or ~0.3 cents/GB. So they aren’t losing on the 2TB subscriptions.
Haha, of course… I was so focused on the math that I completely mixed up the months vs years timeframe 🤦🏻♂️ 😄
Apple charges $9.99 for up to two terabytes.
Apple is paying $300M/year for 8M TB/year, so they pay $37.5/year per TB, or $3.13/month TB.
But consider that not everyone in that tier are using a full 2TB. I'm only using 0.35TB right now. Let's make a guess though that the average 2tb customer is using closer to 1TB. That means Apple is making 6x their storage costs.
Another view. Google prices their bulk cloud storage at $0.02/GB per month. That's $20/month per TB. Apple is obviously getting a substantial discount.
Note: Google charges for more than just data storage. They charge for data transfer over the network, putting and getting objects, etc. I'm treating them as free, which I don't thinks is unreasonable given that most stuff on iCloud is probably uploaded once and sits there for a long time and only retrieved occasionally.
Apple is paying $300M/year for 8M TB/year, so they pay $37.5/year per TB, or $3.13/month TB.
But consider that not everyone in that tier are using a full 2TB. I'm only using 0.35TB right now. Let's make a guess though that the average 2tb customer is using closer to 1TB. That means Apple is making 6x their storage costs.
Another view. Google prices their bulk cloud storage at $0.02/GB per month. That's $20/month per TB. Apple is obviously getting a substantial discount.
Note: Google charges for more than just data storage. They charge for data transfer over the network, putting and getting objects, etc. I'm treating them as free, which I don't thinks is unreasonable given that most stuff on iCloud is probably uploaded once and sits there for a long time and only retrieved occasionally.
To explicitly calculate and talk about storage size, you should use GiB to indicate 2^30 binary values. GB is gigabyte and should reference base 10 values. KB, MB, GB, etc are a bit more ambiguous but that's why KiB, MiB, GiB are explicit with defining binary values.
Honestly … my first thought is how does this play into Apple’s claim that their “stores, offices, and data centers” all run off of 100% clean energy and their entire operation has been carbon neutral since 2018?
If a majority of their data storage needs are actually handled by third party entities, are those facilities required to meet this?
Or is this an interesting way to skirt that commitment … Apple is technically correct with data centers they actually own and control … but not the ones from Google and Amazon?
Curious.
If a majority of their data storage needs are actually handled by third party entities, are those facilities required to meet this?
Or is this an interesting way to skirt that commitment … Apple is technically correct with data centers they actually own and control … but not the ones from Google and Amazon?
Curious.
You make a good point either way, but I do wonder if it's fair to say that this represents a "majority of their data storage needs."
Consider that, with over a billion active iPhones worldwide as of earlier this year, that means at least a billion active iCloud accounts — since very few people own more than one iPhone, it's fair to say that every iPhone represents at least a free iCloud account.
Since every iCloud account has at least 5GB of free storage, that means that even if Apple didn't have a single paying iCloud user, it would still need 5 exabytes of storage to accommodate those accounts. However, analyst reports over the past five years or so have estimated that around 20% of iCloud accounts are on a paid tier. Since these start at 50GB, this means that around 200 million of these accounts make up at least an extra 9 exabytes.
So, even if nobody was paying for anything more than 50GB, that's a minimum of roughly 14 exabytes. This would make the Google portion the "majority," but of course, a good chunk of these 200 million paid accounts are almost certainly paying for more than 50GB of storage, and since the higher tiers are 200GB and 2TB, the storage requirements would just balloon from there.
It's probably almost impossible to know what the breakdown is in terms of storage tiers, but just for the sake of discussion, let's say that 5% of iCloud users pay for the 200GB plan, and only 1% of all iCloud users opt for the 2TB plan. In that case, Apple's iCloud storage requirements would work out to over 41 exabytes, at which point the 8 exabytes that it's buying from Google is really just extra capacity beyond what Apple is yet able to handle in its own data centres. This seems likely as well since Apple is still investing in data centres, but it clearly just can't build them fast enough, when you consider that this report says that its storage requirements from Google grew over 50 percent in the past year alone — perhaps bolstered by Apple One plans and the end of the Google Photos free ride.
This is also a fairly conservative estimate, since there are also iCloud users who are not iPhone users, so they'd be above and beyond those accounted for by the billion active iPhones. Further, while the 200GB and 2TB plans do allow for family sharing, they're also more likely to encompass these non-iPhone iCloud users, such as kids with iPads, iPods, and Family Setup Apple Watches.
The only shame here is Apple hasn't the server farm we perceived iCloud to be.. Amazon and google is large enough in regards to web hosting presence so I hope Apple grows independent once again and gives them a run for their money... iWeb 2.0 please.
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How hard is it to get the key? And what if they lose the key? Is everything on one key? Or does everything have its own key? Is it asdfasdf?
Who uses keys nowadays? Doesn’t everyone just swipe their phone or use a retina scanner? I’m sure google have a fabulous key cutter.
No. Google definitely doesn’t have any quantum computer that comes even close to attacking crypto. For that, it’s estimated that you need around 1,000,000 full qubits.
All this, and your other comments, is unrelated to where the data is stored.
They almost certainly do, when storing them in data centers.
On the contrary, it is a very smart move. Relying on cloud services and economy of scale instead of doing everything yourself. By encrypting the data and not providing encryption keys to Google, data is stored and safe. Remember that this is the business-part of Google, that works a bit different than the consumer side (where you are the product). But better safe than sorry, Apple is really taking care of our privacy.
Anyone who works or has worked in IT knows this claim is utter rubbish
Time costs money and when something goes wrong and you have a service technician say 'i need to confirm that the data is ok', a company is not going to waste time sending over one of their own techs to use the keys to check if the data has been recovered properly. Instead they will email over the unlock keys to the service technician so he/she can do it, thereby reducing time which helps reduce customer complaints wondering when they can get access to their data again.
I've been in that exact situation a number of times. I used to work for a company that serviced and repaired HP servers. A customer would ring up in a panic saying their servers had died and they need help as the servers need to be up and running ASAP. I've got to the site, replaced a few faulty parts and needed to confirm that the data on the server is ok but the data is encrypted. I've asked the customer manager that he needs to get someone down here who has the keys to check the data but it will take a few hours for that person to get there. So with the customer manager under pressure and clients ringing up why can't they get access to their data and me just sitting around waiting for the customer manager to make a decision. The manager under pressure to get things working again cannot wait for the person with the keys to arrive so he instructs the person with the keys to email them over to me so I can un-encrypt the data to check it.
When managers and senior staff are under pressure to get things working again, rules and procedures on security go out the window. Apple will be no different.
Time costs money and when something goes wrong and you have a service technician say 'i need to confirm that the data is ok', a company is not going to waste time sending over one of their own techs to use the keys to check if the data has been recovered properly. Instead they will email over the unlock keys to the service technician so he/she can do it, thereby reducing time which helps reduce customer complaints wondering when they can get access to their data again.
I've been in that exact situation a number of times. I used to work for a company that serviced and repaired HP servers. A customer would ring up in a panic saying their servers had died and they need help as the servers need to be up and running ASAP. I've got to the site, replaced a few faulty parts and needed to confirm that the data on the server is ok but the data is encrypted. I've asked the customer manager that he needs to get someone down here who has the keys to check the data but it will take a few hours for that person to get there. So with the customer manager under pressure and clients ringing up why can't they get access to their data and me just sitting around waiting for the customer manager to make a decision. The manager under pressure to get things working again cannot wait for the person with the keys to arrive so he instructs the person with the keys to email them over to me so I can un-encrypt the data to check it.
When managers and senior staff are under pressure to get things working again, rules and procedures on security go out the window. Apple will be no different.
Google’s Quantum Computer Is About 158 Million Times Faster Than the World’s Fastest Supercomputer
But what is a quantum computer?
So utterly Absurd.
So why stop there? Apple could build its own foundries, display factories, mine it’s own rare earth metals, it’s own glass furnaces, make lots of piece part factories, mine and smelt aluminum, open their own paper mill. They should do it,they are profitable.
Apple isn’t a huge player in the cloud farm business(or industries above) like Microsoft Amazon Google. Buying space from existing infrastructure is something every company does. It’s standard good business. They are not at anyone’s mercy. There are alternatives, every cloud provider knows it, Apple will be a big customer, Apple will be treated like royalty or they’ll go to another.
So you’re sick of people defending Apple? You come to an Apple website to stomp your foot that there’s Apple people here making sense about Apple? How dare we! How dare we not give way to the frantic anti Apple crowd!
Geographic redundancy is definitely good. But it would probably have to be a Google enterprise wide outage for it to matter. Google will have geo redundancy already.
I doubt this is using the consumer-facing product plans and services. Apple likely has a special arrangement with Google for this.
But I wonder how this fits into Appe's claim of "running on 100% renewal energy" if they are using third-party data centres? I do recall Google making that claim, but has Amazon?
But I wonder how this fits into Appe's claim of "running on 100% renewal energy" if they are using third-party data centres? I do recall Google making that claim, but has Amazon?